You may have heard about recent reports of network hackers gaining access to multifunction printers, causing headaches for IT and cyber security personnel. These stories in the news are creating a lot of noise in the industry, overstating the risks of having a printer or MFP installed within an organization’s network. Although the vulnerabilities could be a cause for concern, multifunction printer hacks are relatively harmless, causing incidents such as an MFP to “lock up” using denial of service and brute force attacks. This type of action would require an exceptional, concerted effort by a person within the firewall of an organization to attack a specific multifunction printer. Typically, a person who wanted to do cyber harm within a corporation wouldn’t spend this type of effort to attack a printing device.
It is important to understand that these perceived network vulnerabilities can only be taken advantage of from within a company’s network environment. This means that the network hacker would need to be a company or organizational employee with private network access. The devices are not vulnerable from outside the firewall or from the Internet – unless the network is vulnerable to external attacks. If that is the case, the multifunction printer should be the least of an organization’s worries. Obviously, the first course of action must always be to secure the network.
There are several easy steps that ensures even a hacker within a network cannot directly access a multifunction or standard printer. One long-standing network security solution is called IP address filtering, which limits access to these devices on a departmental basis using standard built-in network security settings.
Security has always been a standard feature from Day 1 in every Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc. bizhub® multifunction printer. Many other manufacturers offer advanced security as an option. Having predicted security concerns in the digital imaging industry, we remain ahead of the curve and continue to improve our efforts to maintain the highest levels of security for all customers. With that in mind, Konica Minolta created our award-winning bizhub SECURE service in 2011.
Konica Minolta’s bizhub SECURE is a professional service that assures each customer’s bizhub multifunction printer is set up with secure complex administrator passwords and other hard drive specific security measures such as:
bizhub Secure was created for customers who do not have the infrastructure, the bandwidth or the resources to configure their multifunction printers alone and need assistance to lock down every unit’s hard drive. More than 100,000 Konica Minolta MFPs have bizhub SECURE enabled at customer sites all over the United States.
We continue to expand our document services security portfolio to include bizhub SECURE Healthcare. The aim is to extend the bizhub SECURE family of services to provide a healthcare organization with a multifunction printer that complies with HIPPA technical requirements regarding PHI (Protected Health Information). In addition to lock-down guard drive protection, the healthcare version introduced additional networking and user authentication security-based functions.
The next offering in our security portfolio is bizhub SECURE Platinum. Upon launch, this new enhanced security service will provide many of the functions that both the standard bizhub SECURE and bizhub SECURE Healthcare provide, but with added focus on other industries and their requirements, such as Finance (PCI) and Education (FERPA).
We have the technology, products, services, and educational materials to help our valued clients and partners confidently use our bizhub multifunction printers without risk from physical attacks, cyberattacks or MFP-based breaches of any confidential or Personally Identifiable information (PII).
Konica Minolta works closely with third-party security consultants to check each system for weaknesses or vulnerability, especially the security of information stored on bizhub multifunction printers. As a result, the total security system on all bizhub MFPs is independently certified to meet stringent ISO 15408 data security standards as established by the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation program. While some manufacturers may only certify a component of their MFP or a “security kit,” the entire system architecture of a Konica Minolta MFP is certified.
We realize that protecting our clients with bizhub SECURE MFPs and large format printers is an absolute requirement in today’s workplace. Our goal is to make our bizhub products the most secure devices available on the market.
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